Lawsuit targets Del Mar's short-term rental ban

Everything is special in the coastal zone: surf, views, and land-use rules.

Among the rules are ones that protect everyone's access to the beach. Those rules are being violated by the city of Del Mar's ban on short-term rentals, according to a lawsuit filed on June 1.

For over a year now, the city has been trying to reduce or altogether prohibit the number of short-term residential rentals in the coastal zone, the lawsuit states. In April, the Del Mar City Council voted to ban such rentals in all residential zones other than residential/commercial mixed-use zones.

Owners said their profitable vacation rentals are a longstanding tradition in the beach town, not an illegal twist in the community plan. They vowed to sue.

Now, the Del Mar Alliance for the Preservation of Beach Access and Village, a nonprofit formed in January, argues that the ban has no legal force because it violates the California Environmental Quality Act and the California Coastal Act.

The ban constitutes a "project" under the California Environmental Quality Act, the suit claims, in part "because it has the potential to cause significant" adverse impacts on the environment, including "conflicts in Respondents' land-use and zoning regulations."

Yet, the city did not perform any environmental review of its potential impacts. Del Mar's Local Coastal Program was certified by the California Coastal Commission as being consistent with the Coastal Act — but with the ban, it no longer is, the suit alleges.

Also, the ban is an amendment of the Local Coastal Program, which applies to all development and land uses in the city's portion of the coastal zone, but the city hasn't submitted it to the Coastal Commission for certification.

A letter from the Coastal Commission sent to Del Mar and other coastal cities last December says that "the regulation of short-term/vacation rentals represents a change in the intensity of use and of access to the shoreline, and thus constitutes development to which the Coastal Act and LCPs must apply."

Among other charges in the lawsuit, petitioners and the public lack "the protection of Coastal Commission oversight" of the ban, the ban decides the property rights of specific vacation rental owners without giving enough prior notice or acknowledging their due-process rights, and the ban retroactively prohibits owners from using their rentals as they have for decades. The city has acknowledged the potential need for environmental review, but disputes the lawsuit's claims.